Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Once before, sixty-three years earlier, a political crisis in Greece had triggered a transformation in US policy. On March 12, 1947, after the British had declared their inability to defeat the Communist insurgency in the Greek civil war, President Truman announced the doctrine of containment, one of the opening moves in the cold war. That summer, Truman’s secretary of state, General George Marshall, would back up containment with his legendary promise of economic aid for Europe. In 2010 there was no antagonist like the Soviet Union to force the Obama administration’s hand. What made Greece into America’s problem was not a global clash of ideologies, but the money coursing through the circulatory system of transatlantic finance. America’s mutual funds had hundreds of billions of dollars at stake in Europe’s banks, above all French banks. It was those same banks that were exposed in Greece. And the US branches of those same European banks were also major lenders to US households and firms. Any eurozone financial crisis would blow back on America.